


tick tick boom

by campitor



Category: The Expanse (TV), The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey
Genre: Angst, Drabble, F/M, Freeform, season five spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:22:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28420887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/campitor/pseuds/campitor
Summary: It’s the one thing going right amidst so much going wrong. He can’t help but smile a little.
Relationships: Jim Holden/Naomi Nagata
Comments: 10
Kudos: 33





	tick tick boom

It doesn’t take long for Bull to find a crew. Within hours, Holden is leading the new recruits to the _Roci_ , freshly repaired on by Tycho’s engineers and perched in her bay like a peregrine waiting to hunt. It feels wrong to lead them to their stations. It feels like a betrayal of Amos, Alex, and Naomi. Alex’s seat is still positioned just how he likes it, and the terminals down in engineering are still greasy from those jalapeno cheese sticks that Amos liked ( _likes_ , his brain supplies). He watches Bull pluck one of Naomi’s short hairs from the crash couch, flick it away for the recyclers to suck up. He swallows the bitter feeling. Later, he thinks. Sometime later he’ll let those feelings out of their cage, let them rattle at his soul.

Powering up the _Roci_ feels good. He knows he’s imagining it, but she feels tense beneath him, ready to go after so long in the repair bay. The diagnostics all read good, just as he knew they would; the _Roci_ blitzes through her diagnostics, each chirping a cheerful READY. It’s the one thing going right amidst so much going wrong. He can’t help but smile a little.

***

Naomi moves quickly. Filip gave her everything, though she knows he didn’t mean to. She’ll process how that makes her feel later. Now, her thoughts are focused on Jim and the _Roci_. If he powers the ship up…the thought collapses in on itself in her head. She is unable to imagine it. Right now, trapped and lonely and frightened, she is unable to imagine a world without Jim and his warm body and his strong arms and the constant, soothing thrum of the _Roci_ , her mother and child, her metal nest.

Marco’s voice creeps into her head suddenly, sibilant and harsh. _Still so worried about your Earther_ , her former lover says. She clamps down on the thought, lets it squirm. Marco has never thought about a human being that wasn’t himself. She repeats this, again and again and again, until she finds Cyn fussing over the scrubbers.

Cyn. Her heart hurts at the sight of him. She buries the feeling. These are thoughts for later. Thoughts to brood over when Jim was safe—or dead.

***

Jim looks at the reactor readings. Good, he thinks. All good. All around him, the crew are getting settled. They’re quiet, but that’s not so different from the norm. Alex and Amos and Naomi had all gotten into their routines. They could practically prep the _Roc_ i through telepathy. He’s still worried about Bull flying the ship, but beggars can’t be choosers, he supposes. The man is stubborn enough; he’ll figure it out after a few bad maneuvers. Holden isn’t worried. Ten minutes and they can launch.

That first tug of gravity can’t come soon enough.

***

Cyn pops the scrubber out, laughing. Naomi gives him a tight-lipped smile. _You idiot_ , she thinks, _you old fucking idiot_. Watching him pains her, fills her with a deep-rooted sorrow that reminds her of leaving Filip behind. Cyn sighs.

“When Filip say you couldn’t take his ship, he wasn’t trying to punish you. He was just—”

“—I know what he was doing,” Naomi interrupts. But Cyn shakes his head, and rage bubbles up in her. She may not know her son, but he grew within her body, nursed himself on her milk. He is _made_ of her. She may not know him, but he _is_ her, and she knows herself.

“This new Filip’s a stranger,” she lies, bending down to hand him a new scrubber. How can Filip be a stranger when he grew within her? How can he be a stranger when his face and eyes betray every thought he has? _A child_ , she thinks. Another bright bloom of pain flares within her, and she stomps it out like embers. Later, later, later. She’ll have all of the time in the world to stare at the walls of her cell and think about Filip.

Cyn is upset. He rambles, but she doesn’t follow. “Adds up, I guess,” he concludes with a shrug. _What adds up?_ Naomi thinks. _Deaths? Years?_ She grabs the wrench.

“Tell me something,” she says innocently. The cold metal of the wrench soothes her. She lets the feeling fill her palm. She lets it ground her. “Did Marco slip the _Augustin Gamarra_ code into the _Roci_?” She says it like she’s asking about that old noodle shop on Ceres that they used to frequent. Cyn looks up, and Naomi acts before she can regret.

Cyn always had a thick skull. She strikes him with the wrench, but it practically ricochets off. He goes down with a grunt, but she knows she doesn’t have long.

***

Being a good military ship, the _Roci_ runs through an exhaustive list of checks as she boots up again. Jim’s impatient, but he reminds himself that it’s one of the reasons she’s so reliable. He watches them all cycle.

Then, a message. He doesn’t recognize the sender, and that alone intrigues him. He accepts the connection, and he is surprised when Naomi’s face fills the screen.

Watching the message is agony. Her warning makes him feel an odd numbness, every mammalian instinct in his brain both keening at her distress and shutting down to protect his own sanity. Her voice is shrill in the same way it gets when they’re in a particularly tight jam. Her eyes look wet. Someone reaches up behind her, grabs her neck, pulls her down. Deep animal instincts scream at him. The _Roci_ , feverish beneath him, is the only thing that grounds him in place.

“I’m shutting down the reactor,” he says. He’s barely conscious of his own actions. His hands move as if on strings, and his mind acts without his permission. Bull shouts. He ignores it.

The message plays again. He wishes he could turn it off, but his own fingers betray him. The sight of her face, contorted with anguish, leaves him feeling empty.

***

Cyn’s hands are rough on her neck. He drags her down, clamps down tight. It doesn’t take long for Filip and Marco to arrive. They yank her away, shove her back into her cell, _tsk-tsk_ her as if she were a child. Marco smirks, but he leaves quickly; he could never handle any emotion, and she lets the little victory warm her. Filip stares at her, some sort of dark anger burning in his eyes. Cyn just looks hurt. She barely registers the blood clotted along his forehead. She bangs on the door, screams at them. She should know. She deserves to know. Even if Jim is dead, she deserves to know. One by one, they walk away.

She thinks about Jim. She thinks about Jim alive. For a moment, she fantasizes about him swooping in on the _Roci_ , about telling him everything, about his terrible morning breath and the way he talks to himself when he thought no one was around. She fantasizes about saving Filip and presenting him with his own cabin on the _Roci_. She imagines a new family. A better family. _Better?_ Marco asks in her head. Naomi screws her eyes shut.

Then, she thinks about Jim dead. Her mind clutches to that idea. Strangely, it’s safer to assume that he’s dead, that his body his radioactive ash, that the _Roci_ is gone and that she’s taken out half of Tycho with her violent demise. She thinks about the sight of Jim’s face, lips fixed in a startled “oh” as the _Roci_ bucks and bursts beneath him, and it leaves her feeling empty. She lets the emptiness expand within her. If they will not tell her, then she will not allow herself to feel. She solders the cracks within herself shut, and she makes a home for herself within the bitter hollowness.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find me on Tumblr at pig-wings.tumblr.com.


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